In last week’s column, we marched through the millennia to track the technological improvements in clothing since Adam and Eve sewed some fig leaves together to hide their nakedness. Improvements came in material, fasteners, and decoration. The result was better clothes: better fit, better warmth, better style – not to mention becoming easier to put on and take off.
If any one of us were given the choice of wearing, on a regular basis, today’s clothing or that from yesteryear, we would pick the new garments.
But there is more to getting better than the technical characteristics. There are also the economic, social, and cultural aspect of clothing. In this week’s post, I’m going to argue that clothing is cheaper (less expensive). That’s a good in and of itself. Cheaper clothing means more resources available for other things.
More controversially, I’m going to argue that these cheaper clothes have the long-term impact of reducing poverty amongst producers as well as consumers.
Finally, I’m going to argue that improvements in clothing have made for a more democratic, less hierarchical society.
That’s a lot of claims about being better, so let’s get at it.
Clothing gets less expensive
It’s a mugs game to attempt to apply some inflation indexing over long periods of time (“a dollar today is worth XXX dollars three centuries ago”). Currencies change. New products get invented and old products transformed. We’ll ditch money as a measure by going back to Karl Marx. He used labor-time as an expression of value. In this case, we’ll estimate how long a normal person would have to work in order to buy a garment.
Let’s start pre-industrial revolution.
British historian Christopher Dyer estimates it took an average person six to seven days to earn enough to buy a shirt around 1500. Another historian, Caroline Johnson estimates it took a servant in the court of English King Henry VIII between three- and ten-days service to buy a shirt – depending on the amount of embroidery. Other academics have reached similar conclusion. Clothing used to be really expensive. It was so expensive that individual items of clothing were listed in the people’s wills.
Let’s now fast forward several centuries. We’ll go past the industrial revolution. I’ve done my own calculations for Canada, with three points of comparison: a century ago, the year I was born, and today. I looked at the 1924 and 1957 Eaton’s catalogue to find the price of what seems to be a garment of average quality. Midrange. Not the cheapest. Not the most expensive. For 2024, I did the same thing based on an Amazon search. I then calculated how long a person would need to work at the average wage level (government statistics) to buy typical garments. These calculations are approximations, but they give a pretty good order-of-magnitude idea of cost (in hours of labor) for different garments.
Labor time needed to purchase a man’s shirt:
1924: 7 hours
1957: 5 hours
2024: 1.1 hours
Labor time needed to purchase a pair of man’s pants:
1924: 8 hours
1957: 6 hours
2024: 1.2 hours
Labor time needed to purchase a woman’s blouse:
1924: 12 hours
1957: 4 hours
2024: 0.7 hours
Labor time needed to purchase a woman’s skirt:
1924: 10 hours
1957: 6 hours
2024: 0.9 hours
Labor time needed to purchase a woman’s pair of pants:
1924: N/A - Eaton’s did not appear to sell woman’s pants
1957: 6 hours
2024: 1.2 hours
One further observation.
The calculations above are based on average male wages. If we were looking at the cost in terms of the number of hours a woman needed to work, clothing in the good old days cost even more. In 1924, the average female hourly wage was 29 percent lower than the male average hourly wage. In 1957, female wages were 40 percent lower than male wages. Today, the average women’s hourly wage is less than 10 percent lower than the average male wage.
Anyways…
Clothing is a lot cheaper than it used to be. In centuries past, worn shirts were specifically listed as a bequest in a will. In response to last week’s column, one Facebook commentator said clothes have become worse because of the difficulties and inconvenience of giving old clothes away. That’s a change. My assertion is that it is a change for the better.
Another sign of cheapness is disposability. We replace rather than mend. When is the last time you patched a hole a garment? There are environmental negatives associated with disposability, but when it is cheaper and more convenient to replace instead of repair, our ability to purchase has become better.
Cheapness is better for producers
Purchasing clothing is cheaper than it was in the good old days, however defined. Going back to last week’s column, the lowering of cost has been accompanied by an increase in quality. Something that is both cheaper and of higher quality is better for consumers. This is not an argument. It is a fact.
I’m going to assert something more controversial. I’m going to assert that the process of clothing becoming cheaper is better for producers as well.
Just as the cost of clothing kept consumers poor in the good old days, low levels of productivity kept producer’s poor as well. We can divide the production of clothing into four components:
Creating fiber. This is done by herding/shearing animals such as sheep or by growing and processing crops such as cotton. When this production was powered by human or animal muscle, the result was back-breaking labor under harsh conditions. Think of slavery, for example.
Spinning fiber into thread. Prior to the industrial revolution, there were two spinning technologies. The foot-powered spinning wheel was the high-tech, high-speed technology. Well, sort of. I’ve asked a few fabric craftspeople I know. They tell me a skilled spinner can produce enough yarn to knit a sweater in 10 to 15 hours. Of course, modern spinners have advantages such as heated work areas and artificial light. In the good old days, the slow and primitive method was a drop spindle. This had the advantage of allowing a spinner to produce thread while doing other things. One hand for spinning, one for cooking or weeding the garden. You’ve heard the saying, “a women’s work is never done”. This originally described spinning.
Weaving. Looms have existed for a long time, but weaving was hard and slow work. Before the flying shuttle was invented in 1733 (the first step in the industrial revolution), an average weaver could produce about 2 inches of cloth per hour. What’s more, it could only be as wide as the length of the weaver’s arm. Wider cloth (up to about 5 feet) needed a loom operated by two people.
Sewing. This was done by hand. It is slow and painstaking – another reason a woman’s work was never done.
Beginning with the invention of the flying shuttle in 1733, clothing production changed dramatically. The main inventions were:
The Spinning Jenny – spinning (1764)
The Water Frame – weaving (1769)
The Spinning Mule - spinning (1779)
The Power Loom - weaving (1785)
The Cotton Gin – fiber preparation (1794)
The Roberts' Loom - weaving (1822)
The Self-Acting Mule - spinning (1825)
Howe Sewing Machine - sewing (1844)
The productivity gains were remarkable. For example, by 1835 a self-acting mule could produce 25 times as much thread per hour of labor than the most efficient hand spinners in the world – and the productivity gains were just getting warmed up. These newfangled machines were initially powered by human muscle or waterpower. When the steam engine began to power factories, more exponential productivity growth occurred.
The new machines moved cloth production from the homes of artisans to factories. They also put the artisan producers out of business since hand-production could not compete with the cheaper, higher-quality cloth produced by machine production. The artisans generally responded by trying to destroy the machines, burn the factories, and kill the new industrialists. It was, however, hopeless. Then as now, consumers were price conscious. They demanded cheaper and they got cheaper.
One other point. The inventions alternated between spinning and weaving. Innovation in one part of the value chain increased productivity, which made the other part a bottleneck. The mechanization of sewing came later than in spinning and weaving. Last to mechanize was the production of fiber. In this, technology did not really begin to change until the adoption of the tractor in the 1920s. This made cheap labor imperative and was a major reason slavery lasted in plantation regions until the last half of the 1800s. In the cotton growing areas of the United States, slavery was replaced by the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws designed to keep field laborers in the field working cheaply.
One immediate effect of the productivity increases in clothing production was to throw a lot of artisan producers out of work. One machine tender could do the work of 25 skilled spinners. This produced a lot of misery, deprivation, and dislocation. In the long run (inter-generationally) this “freed” workers who would have been working the field, spinning, weaving, and sewing from hard, low-productivity jobs. This sounds like a bad thing (and in the short term, it was), but in the longer term it allowed people to do other things. A small number of people produce our clothes – and make more money than the masses of old-style artisan producers did while doing so. The rest of us can do other things. If clothing had not become so much cheaper, we could have very, very few teachers, nurses, computer programmers, mechanics, lawyers, social media influencers, and all the rest of the vast array of modern occupations. These folk would be too busy hoeing, spinning, weaving and sewing for subsistence incomes.
For myself, I get to teach college and write Substack articles in my spare time. If clothes had not become so much cheaper, there’s a good chance I’d be working a hand loom for 12 hours per day. My life is better than it would have been if we still relied on large numbers of workers to produce small amounts of clothing.
One other thing on the economics.
Over the past 60 or 70 years, a lot of textile and clothing production has moved from richer countries to poorer ones. Many of my friends argue this is exporting low wages and poverty.
Codswallop.
When the migration of clothing production from North America to Asia started happening after the Second World War, very poor countries such as Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan began to produce our clothes. Not so much any longer. These countries got richer with textiles and clothing, and then moved on to higher value production. Our clothing production then moved to countries that were much poorer. Bangladesh. India. Vietnam. These are still poor countries, but since 1990 (around the start of the transition in source countries) the per capita GDP in real terms (adjusted for inflation) has been:
· In India, 262 percent,
· In Bangladesh, 242 percent,
· In China, 1,136 percent, and
· In Vietnam, 406 percent.
The growth in prosperity in these clothing producing/exporting countries is higher – much higher – by an order of magnitude higher – than in poor countries that have not developed export-orientated textile and clothing industries.
Making cheaper clothing is a gateway drug to prosperity.
Life in these clothe-producing countries is better than it was in the good old days.
Clothing better for democracy
Cheaper clothing has reduced social inequality. By and large, the poor now have a similar ability to stay warm as do the rich.
But there is more.
At least since the dawn of agriculture, “clothes made the man”. When clothing was really expensive, it was readily apparent who was rich and who was poor. The rich wore clothes. The poor wore rags.
This economic distinction was accompanied by stratification by caste and occupation. You could tell who was who and what they did by their clothing. In many cases, these cultural markings were enforced by coercion. Sumptuary laws dictated who could wear what. Wearing clothing above your station could be fatal. For example:
In ancient Rome, only Senators and senior magistrates were allowed to wear togas with a stripe of the expensive Tyrian purple,
In thirteenth century France, prostitutes were required to wear a striped cloak,
In medieval England, only royalty and nobility at or above the rank of Duke were allowed to wear silk. A short time later, people had to pass an income means test before wearing satin,
In pre-revolutionary France, only members of the royal family were allowed to wear velvet or gold-colored lace,
When the Puritans established the Massachusetts Bay Colony, only people with a personal wealth of over 200 Pounds sterling were allowed to wear lace, hatbands, belts or ruffles,
And so on.
These class-based, legislatively enforced limitations on what people could wear started to dissolve in the Americas. Around the time of the revolution, visitors from England or Europe (who were generally rich) complained that they could not tell who was whom based on their clothing. This trend towards democratization and abolition of the visible symbols of social status was limited so long as clothing was expensive. High cost created clues about who was rich and who was poor. The cheapening of clothing has diminished these distinctions. The rich – or at least the affluent – dress like everyone else. Democratic egalitarianism has gone further in clothing than in most other aspects of life because clothing has become so cheap. There is less social differentiation in clothing than in housing. It was not always thus.
So that’s the story.
Clothing is better than in the good old days. Better quality. Cheaper to buy. Better at reducing poverty. More egalitarian.
Better.